Computational Social Science and Culture in the Age of Social Media

Chris Bail
Duke University

link to this presentation: https://cbail.github.io/IAS_Talk.html
website: https://www.chrisbail.net
twitter: https://twitter.com/chris_bail
github: https://github.com/cbail
data: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/chris_bail

How do civil society groups stimulate viral social media conversations?

Theory of cultural resonance

 

Theory of cultural resonance

For more detailed criticism, see Bail, Christopher A. 2015. Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream, Princeton: Princeton University Press. and McDonnell, Terry, Christopher Bail, and Iddo Tavorry. 2017. “A Theory of Cultural Resonance,” Sociological Theory 35(1): 1-14.

A new theory cultural resonance

Cultural Complexity

Cultural complexity

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-1

See Christopher A. Bail. 2016. “Cultural Carrying Capacity: Organ Donation Advocacy, Discursive Framing, and Social Media Engagement.” Social Science and Medicine 165: 280-288

Topic validation

See Christopher A. Bail. 2016. “Cultural Carrying Capacity: Organ Donation Advocacy, Discursive Framing, and Social Media Engagement.” Social Science and Medicine 165: 280-288 and the stm package in R

Topics

See Christopher A. Bail. 2016. “Cultural Carrying Capacity: Organ Donation Advocacy, Discursive Framing, and Social Media Engagement.” Social Science and Medicine 165: 280-288 and the stm package in R

Coefficient of Discursive Variation

 

Where \( \theta \) is the standard deviation of the membership matrix of organization \( i \)'s posts in the thirty-nine topic categories during the previous week and \( \mu \) is the mean score of the posts across all topic areas during the same time period.

 
 
 
 
 

See Christopher A. Bail. 2016. “Cultural Carrying Capacity: Organ Donation Advocacy, Discursive Framing, and Social Media Engagement.” Social Science and Medicine 165: 280-288

See Bail Christopher A. 2015.“Taming Big Data: Using App Technology to Study Organizational Behavior on Social Media.” Sociological Methods and Research 46:2, 189-21

Cultural complexity

See Christopher A. Bail. 2016. “Cultural Carrying Capacity: Organ Donation Advocacy, Discursive Framing, and Social Media Engagement.” Social Science and Medicine 165: 280-288

Cultural Position

Cultural position

See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828

Constructing cultural networks

See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828 and the texnets package in R.

Calculating "cultural betweenness"

 

Modified Djikstra Algorithm for weighted networks:

 
Cultural Betweenness of each organization (i) by day (t):

 
 
 

See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828 and the texnets package in R.

The cultural network of Autism Civil Society Groups on Facebook

See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828

The cultural network of Autism civil society groups on facebook

See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828

Results

See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828

Results

See Bail, Christopher A. 2016. “Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Ad-vocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42): 11823-11828. Visual created using Cubix.

TextNets: R Package

Webpage for package (with tutorial) http://github.com/cbail/textnets

Cultural Articulation

Idealized cognitive-emotional current

See Bail, Christopher A., Taylor W. Brown, and Marcus Mann. 2017. “Channeling Hearts and Minds: Cognitive-Emotional Currents and Public Deliberation on Social Media.”American Sociological Review, 82(6) 1188-1213

Real cognitive-emotional currents

See Bail, Christopher A., Taylor W. Brown, and Marcus Mann. 2017. “Channeling Hearts and Minds: Cognitive-Emotional Currents and Public Deliberation on Social Media.”American Sociological Review, 82(6) 1188-1213

Phase shift

 

Where E is the amount of emotional language of organization i at time t and C is the amount of rational language or organization i at time t.

 
 
 
 
 
 

See Bail, Christopher A., Taylor W. Brown, and Marcus Mann. 2017. “Channeling Hearts and Minds: Cognitive-Emotional Currents and Public Deliberation on Social Media.”American Sociological Review, 82(6) 1188-1213

Results

See Bail, Christopher A., Taylor W. Brown, and Marcus Mann. 2017. “Channeling Hearts and Minds: Cognitive-Emotional Currents and Public Deliberation on Social Media.”American Sociological Review, 82(6) 1188-1213

WHAT NEXT?

Do cultural position and cultural articulation interact to produce cultural resonance?

Messaging does not occur in a vacuum/discourses enable and constrain each other

Cultural resonance is episodic; how can we calculate the possibility of cultural change at any given moment?

Solution: culture as a signed network

Constructing signed networks via text

 

But... Some people talk more than others

And... Sentence parsers are not perfect

And... Sentiment analysis is :(

AND NOW…SHAMELESS PLUGS!

Link for 2020 event

Oxford Series in Computational Social Science

 

Thank You!

 

Email: christopher.bail@duke.edu

Website: www.chrisbail.net

GitHub: github.com/cbail

Twitter: www.twitter.com/chris_bail

Data Collection Process

 

Examining different Lag Lengths

 

Cultural Bridges in LGBT Advocacy

Cultural Bridges in Climate Change Advocacy

Cultural Bridges in Organ Donation Advocacy